Where Should I Comment
By now you should know I am a big advocate of commenting on other blogs. Until just recently it was commenting on any blog that caught my fancy. I will still do that, but I have had a blogging epiphany. I was checking my comments this morning on The Other Blog when I found what I thought was a spamback, that is a trackback to a spam site. Not recognizing this site I followed the link and sure enough it was a spam site full of nofollow linked bookmarks. I usually just close that tab and mark the comment as spam so my software knows in the future. I did the second part but the title of one link intrigued me and then a few more until I had an exrta twenty tags up. Most of these sites had great CSS tutorials which I may well gather up for a post in How to Blog.
Some of these fabulous posts were showing the spamback with dofollow links, and I am going to have a chat with the owners after I comment. This spam site was initially just a small diversion which took me to some great blogs. Then I noticed he had his Alexa button up, with a huge number of blogs linking in. When I checked that, I hit the mother load of information. There are sites there that can help me, a legitimate blogger as much or more than they are helping this doofus. What I am getting at is the next time you think spam comments are worthless think again. Check who might they are linking too and who is linking in to them. By the end of the day I plan to add another dozen or so links coming into half a dozen of my blogs. Not a bad take for thoroughly investigating a bit of suspicious spam.
Reduce Your Comment Spam
UPDATE: Don Not Use WP Spam Free right now. the plugin is actually working a little too well at some things despite what the author claims. This plugin is in need of a serious overhaul. Not only can it prevent you from getting legitimate comments by not recognizing your javascript settings, it can prevent incoming and outgoing pings to your blog. I am currently recommending Akismet complimented by Bad Behavior. If you want to allow unmoderated comments I suggest you add a math captcha
As you may or may not have figured out blogs get a lot of comment spam no matter if you are nofollow, dofollow, moderating or not moderating comments, using human interface spam protection (captcha) or not. That said there are a number of ways to reduce the amount of smap you see. The first plugin you are introduced to with Wordpress is Akismet, despite coming standard with wordpress it is not worthless, unlike the hello dolly plugin. Simply activating this will reduce the spam you see by a hundred fold. That said I don’t think it is the best plugin to use.
I like a three plugin approach for managing comment spam. The first is WP Spam Free, This plugin is as good as Akismet for the same kind of spam blocking but takes it a step further. You can keep using akismet but it seems to take priority and still suffers from a frustrating number of false positives. Angering readers trying to make comments isn’t a good way to keep them. The second thing WP Spam Free does is eliminate the need for any sort of captcha protection. In fact you should not use one while using this plugin as they can corrupt your install. This sort of active plugin will also allow you to stop moderating your comments before publication if you like, making for a more interactive responsive reader experience.
The second anti-spam plugin is WP Comment Remix. The best part of this plugin for me is the ability to directly reply to and quote other comments. That isn’t the only feature thought. If you have commentators who regularly come back to abuse your your nofollow status you can either spam or simply delink the authors link from the comment. I often times have to do this because authors make meaningful comments adding to the discussion, but link to affiliate and porn sites. Frankly if anyone is going to make affiliate or porn money from my blog, it should be me. However providing an active link to those sort of sites is bad for your google ranking and can earn you a reputation you don’t want from certain blogging communities.
The last approach to spam control is the most drastic and not one I use very often. WP Ban by Lester Chan works wonderfully even if the approach is rather draconic. You can ban users by IP, IP Range, host name, user agent and referer url from visiting your WordPress blog. Used wrong you could end up banning a public hotspot so you need to pay attention to how you use this feature.
In the end if you want lots of comments turn off your moderate comments, add CommentLuv & KeywordLuv and advertise yourself everywhere you comment as yourname @ A DoFollow Blog. If you do that and add these comments you can become a comment superstar.
The Other Blog Lite
In honor of my 250,000th unique visitor to The Other Blog I am proud to announce the release of my latest free wordpress theme, The Other Blog Lite. This Adsense ready theme is a fixed 800 pixel width ready to display a good mix of advertising, featured posts, featured video and your latest endeavors and that is just on the home page. This freemium theme comes complete with the photoshop file for the logo, an array of specialized page templates and the plugins that make it all possible.
A working blog using this theme can be seen at How To Blog. More color choices will be available soon and expect a new crop of themes in the coming weeks. So stay tuned to our homepage for all the latest details.
Blogger Unleashed
As promised I have reopened and taken Blogging For Noobs off the market after it sitting for sell for some time. One of our new weekly features is a featured blog. This week is Blogger Unleashed. (Warning: if you think any of my blogs use strong language, Vic might be too much for you)
The first thing you will notice on the homepage is the big fat logo image and his featured article. Also in the opening screen is a box with a bunch of ways to subscribe to his blog. The last thing you are going to notice when you load up, if you notice it at all depending on your screen resolution is the advertising is all located on the right hand side of the screen.
Here are the things I think work on in the opening screen. There is instant navigation links at the top of the page. This lets me quickly skip the home page since I have seen it plenty of times. The logo has a message and his catch phrase. You instantly know what the blog is about. The subscribe to links make it easy for you to get to the meat of the blog on your own terms. The last thing we see in the opening shot is a featured post which has a video. This is what Vic sees as some of his most important information, so it gets a prime spot. The only thing I find that doesn’t work for me, can’t be seen directly. I looked at the page source and didn’t care for the extensive use of tables. It has worked for him so far, so all I can say is it is a pet peeve and my problem not his.
Let’s take a look at one of his posts now. You find the same header information you did on the home page. All the extraneous information is on the right hand side of the blog while the post takes up a little less than half the page width. The text itself is broken with graphic elements, which in this case happen to be advertising. You also find he has bold faced the important keywords of the post. After the text you get a good list of related posts and then the comments.
Here is where I think the posts go right. The keywords are bolded for SEO purposes, this is something I am slowly going back and doing myself. He uses good density of the keywords he wants to promote. The post itself isn’t a long continuous bit of text. (short posts without breaks are okay, long ones are hard to read) The post column is also thin enough that it doesn’t strain the eyes moving all over the page. Once again all the extraneous information is on the right side of the page not interfering with the reading. The second place the post goes right is the inclusion of related posts. This helps draw readers further into your site.
In the end not only are you going to learn a lot about what does and doesn’t work on a blog by reading it, you can quite easily figure out the best ways to lay your blog out by studying the design of successful blogs. Vic uses strong language, but fuck it so do I, and so do most people if they are honest enough to admit it. His blog is still top notch and well worth reading even if you are easily offended. I’ll go so far as to say especially if you are easily offended, being outside your comfort zone is the best way for you to learn anything. Keep up the great work Vic.
